


Defining the Heart

by SaltyWords (agent4hire22)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 11x03 coda, Angsty Schmoop, Canon Compliant, Kissing, Love Confessions, M/M, Undressing, also Oneshot-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 03:49:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5076688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent4hire22/pseuds/SaltyWords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“No, Cas,” Dean hesitated, took the case from him and set it to the side. “Life’s not a movie, You weren’t some little rich girl. You’ve been through hell and back because of me. You’re a martyr. I didn’t save you. I’m the one that burned you out. You’re stuck in a bunker now with two codependent assholes and a snowball’s chance of ever righting all the wrong we’ve done. There’s no fade-to-black happy ending waiting in the wings. You’ve lost everything because of me. You should be running the other direction. I don’t see the love in that.”</p><p>Castiel swallowed. The snakes in his gut grew to pythons and it took a turn. “I can tell you where it is,” he said softly. He touched Dean’s chin, ran a light finger over the split in his lip. “It was all over our conversation earlier when you refused to let me heal these bruises.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defining the Heart

**Author's Note:**

> 11x03 Coda because it just made me so happy.

In the violating silence of the night, Castiel listened to the hum of the refrigerator and thought of the life he used to have.

Before the Winchesters. Before he’d stolen his vessel in the name of God. Before all of it, there was Heaven. The Garrison. The angels. They were his family. They were all he knew. 

There’d been order there. Calm, blind compliance. Everyone had a mission. Everyone had a duty.

And it was fine. He was …happy. 

But, then he’d met Dean, and his world flipped top side down. Everything he thought he understood was a lie. Everything he thought made him happy, instead made him feel like stone. He quickly realized what he felt in Heaven wasn’t happiness at all, but numbness.

His life had been hollow. Devoid of sincerity, curiosity, spice.

So, that day Dean had pled to him, chaotic passion flowing from his words in vibrant colors, Cas had been eager to listen. “If there was ever anything to die for, this is it!” And, even though Cas hadn’t really understood why dying for the sake of humanity was the ultimate of all possible deaths, he’d believed him.

Dean ticked a light on for Castiel, and, after that, he couldn’t fathom sitting in the dark anymore. He shucked his halo, stripped the feathers from his wings, and willingly followed Dean into the unknown.

He abandoned his family. Isolated himself from Heaven, God, everything he’d ever known. And made an example of how not to be to the rest of the angels.

But he didn’t really understand what any of that meant until recently. Until the sharp ends of two angel blades were carving his flesh for kicks, and his only angelic friend in the world had betrayed him with sad, unapologetic eyes.

_I’m sorry, Castiel. I’m doing this because you don’t serve the angels anymore. You serve man. You don’t belong in heaven with us. And, you’ll never come back._

Hannah had said it in not so many words. 

She was right. Even if they hadn’t turned on him, Castiel knew there was nothing for him in heaven anymore.

Because of Dean.

Because earlier that evening, Dean had shown him what a true friend looked like. Behind the swelling welts and bruises from their fight, he’d said, “you’re right. There aren’t words because there’s no need… besides, I had it coming.” Such shame and regret in his face, Cas could have been buried under it. Might as well have been, after Dean refused the heal. 

It was a kindness the angels never came close to showing him. And the realization twisted around him like an iron fist to his stomach.

It was obvious to Cas now that he would never go back to heaven, and it had nothing to do with the angels at all. 

It was because of love. 

He knew the angels didn’t love him. They never had. They may have been loyal and obedient, but love, they could not do. It was too chaotic. Too dirty. 

There was no rhyme or reason to it. 

It just was.

On the other hand, Dean and he had had their trespasses, but, every time it truly mattered, Dean radiated with that spark that had set Castiel’s wings on fire so many years before.

And, Cas wasn’t sure it was all the same, or even, if what he felt was nearly as pure, but he could now put a finger on that feeling twisting in the empty chambers of his heart. It was chaotic, dirty, and sincere. It was his fresh born heart, warm and beating. Bleeding through the carved initials. 

_DW._

He took a shaky breath and ran a sweaty palm over the kitchen table, the beers he’d pulled from the fridge bled condensation on the wood top, when he picked them up, the ring they left behind sat fat on the surface. 

It was all because of Dean.

  
  


\---

  
  


Castiel peeked into the library and shuffled up to the first mahogany table. Dean glanced at him from behind the striped red ice pack. “You get lost in Wonderland or something, Alice?”

“No, I was in the kitchen.” Cas set both beers on the table and frowned. He wasn’t completely sure why he’d grabbed two. Dean took one and pushed the other back toward him.

The little lamp to his right caressed the room in a soft glow, picked up the red tint in Dean’s hair and tossed it out around his crown like a rusted halo. Stacks of books still towered in the corners, many more laid horizontal in the shelves, but a good deal of them had already been put away. Sam was being meticulous about it. Reorganizing them based on the frequency of use, instead of subject category and relative publish date as the Men of Letters had done.

“This’ll be better,” he said. “I’ve toyed with this idea on my laptop for a while.” 

Sam flipped a book over and read the back. “With case files and such it’s been working really well. I figured no better time than now to try it in the library, they’re all already unshelved.”

Dean grunted, his eyebrows going crooked as he watched his brother stoop for another dusty book.“Whatever you wanna do, Howard Hughes. As long as we can find shit, I don’t care how it’s shelved.” He took a healthy swig of his beer and rolled his neck. “I say it’s movie time.” Then, those affectionate eyes turned on Castiel.“Cas? Movie?” 

His words lisped around the welt in his lower lip. But the warmth in his face stood through the welts and bruises like tropical water through black sand.

Cas tried to corral his stomach full of snakes. “Sure.”

  
  


\---

  
  


The tv room was quiet and dark. Warm with the push of the forced air.

“Okay, I feel like I haven’t watched anything in forever, so maybe we’ll go with a classic. I need some comfort food.” Dean dug through a wire basket of DVDs. “Die Hard, eh? You seen that one?”

“Is that the one where Bruce Willis saves people from terrorists?” Cas flopped onto the couch and felt like his coat was strangling him. He sat forward, shrugged it off, then thought a moment and plucked his suit coat off too.

“Yes, but that’s literally the premise to all of them,” Dean mumbled. “What do you feel like?”

“I don’t have a genre preference. Maybe, Nosferatu or Metropolis?”

Dean’s face scrunched. “Aren’t those silent movies?”

“You said a classic.”

“Classic like, Blade Runner, or Scarface, Cas. Not classic like from the beginning of time.” He pulled a DVD from the bin and tipped his head, glanced up. “Sammy, movie? Yes or no?” His eyes walked over the DVD jacket like he was seeing an old flame.

“No!” Sam called, still tucked away in the library.

Dean smiled. “Since Debbie Downer won’t be joining us, how about a guilty pleasure?” He held up the movie and Cas scanned the scribbled pink text.

“Dirty Dancing?”

“Swayze always gets a pass,” he said with raised eyebrows.

  
  


\---

  
  


Cas found himself smiling as he watched the protagonists take off in their empowering last dance. He kept glancing at Dean who, despite having had a beer run dry over an hour before, hadn’t so much as hinted at getting up. He’d settled on the floor just to the left of Cas, Cas on the couch above him. He figured he’d spent enough time on the floor,

_or hung up_

The last couple of days. The soft couch was just what he needed.

“Oh, she finally did the lift.”

Dean hummed. “She did. Grand finale.” 

Cas squinted, watched the people filter onto the dance floor, break the old rope lines of tradition and join the dancers. It looked familiar to him. “Because she loves him,” Cas said definitively. That was always how it worked, in his experience. Love was the catalyst that propelled someone into the unknown.

“Well, she trusts him anyway.”

Cas looked down at Dean again. His face lit in the TV’s playful glow. “No, she loves him,” he said. “You can’t have one without the other.”

Dean smiled. “Okay. I mean, sure. That’s the idea.”

As the screen faded to black and the credits rolled, the room filled with heavy synth music and balmy lyrics. “Dancing is supposed to be the language of love,” Cas said after a moment. “Did you know that?”

“I’ve heard that, yeah.”

“Have you ever danced?”

Dean stretched, found a passing interest in his empty beer bottle and shook it. “Everyday, Cas. Like nobody’s watching. You never noticed?”

Cas frowned, tried to peg one time he’d seen Dean dance. He imagined him spinning through the war room in the mornings, coffee cup in one hand, robe flailing out behind him. A crooked smile cracked his face. “I would probably remember that,” he said. “In any case,” he sat forward and straightened his crooked tie. “I enjoyed it. I’ve never been dancing, but I still feel like I can relate.”

Dean craned his head, smirked. “Yeah? Swayze use the power of dance to break you from your shell too?”

Cas shrugged, soaking in Dean’s smile and playful tone. His stomach tossed again and he was compelled to touch him, feel the warmth of his skin, find out if it was as warm as his smile.

“Yeah, kind of.” He folded up a leg and quickly leaned down plopping a kiss on Dean’s temple.

Dean shied back surprised. “What are you doing?”

“I’m thanking you,” Cas said, bent by the sudden rush of heat to his cheeks.

“For what?”

_Everything,_ he thought immediately. _For saving me, for not giving up, for coming back. For looking at me like you are right now. For your endless green eyes and technicolor heart. For asking me to watch this movie with you even though you wouldn’t watch it with Sam._ He looked up and tried to sum it all up, take the important piece out of each thing and shove it together into something a little more manageable. 

“For giving me love,” he said tilting his head. “For teaching it to me.”

“What?” Dean blinked back Castiel’s words, his face twisted with a sour uncertainty he seemed to need to spit out. He worked a couple things through his mouth, his jaw bouncing, before he finally settled on something to say. “I sincerely hope you’re not trying to learn that from me.”

_But I already have_. Cas caught a ball of reservation in his throat and swallowed his words down. “Why?”

Dean’s brows hit his hairline, like that was the most inane question he could have heard. “Because I-- I suck at it, Cas. I’m like the worst possible example of that--” he threw a loose hand in the air and his shoulders jumped. “Love stuff.”

Cas shook his head, looked through the woven red fabric on the couch cushions like he was missing the big picture and it was sewn into the cover. “I disagree,” he said his chest tight. “I think you’re the best example of it.”

Dean’s eyes bounced through his’ face settling at his lips a moment before retreating to the floor. “Too much romantic drama for you, I think.” He plucked the remote from the floor beside his leg and turned the DVD player off. The picture of Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze disappeared, and the screen went blue. _Default to AUX 1_ blinking at the top. “It’s okay, between you an’ me, Swayze’ll do that to you.”

“You don’t understand,” Cas blurted. “Angels don’t love, Dean. Not naturally, anyway. They have respect, regard for one another. They often confuse love with duty, but at the core, they’re callous and cold. You know that.

“The ones that strung me up a few days ago were just as eager to gut me as any angel has ever been to embrace me. So tell me, what’s this feeling in my chest? It didn’t come from heaven. Where did I learn it if not from you?”

“What are you talking about? You’re just different. Always have been.”

“Because of you.”

“No. I had nothing to do with it.”

Cas blinked, frowned. “But, you did. You saved me from a sterilized life.” He looked around, plucked the movie from his feet and held it up. “Like Johnny did for Baby. He taught her love.”

“No, Cas.” Dean hesitated, took it from him and set it to the side. “Life’s not a movie, You weren’t some little rich girl. You’ve been through hell and back because of me. You’re a martyr. I didn’t save you. I’m the one that burned you out. You’re stuck in a bunker now with two codependent assholes and a snowball’s chance of ever righting all the wrong we’ve done. There’s no _fade-to-black_ happy ending waiting in the wings. You’ve lost everything because of me. You should be running the other direction. I don’t see the love in that.”

Castiel swallowed. The snakes in his gut grew to pythons and took a turn. “I can tell you where it is,” he said softly. He touched Dean’s chin, ran a light finger over the split in his lip. “It was all over our conversation earlier when you refused to let me heal these bruises.”

The muscle at the back of Dean’s jaw jumped and he pulled his face from Cas’ hand.

“I did the same thing, you know?” Cas said quickly. “After you left the bunker.” 

He choked down a mouthful of sawdust. Dean’s eyes lined with tears and his gaze hit the floor. He flushed crimson. It hit the tips of his ears and blotted patterns onto his neck.

“I laid there for a long time just… feeling it. I couldn’t pick myself back up. Sam had to. I just stayed there til he found me. Even after, I didn’t heal for a while because--,” an uneasy smile hit him and he knew it was because he didn’t know why he was still talking. Why he was saying all of this. “I, uh, I thought that was going to be the last time I saw your face, Dean. I thought the pain would help me remember your face.” He smiled again and it turned into a wince. “That’s stupid.”

He searched for Dean’s eyes but, Dean had them nailed down.

“I honestly thought it was just short of a fitting punishment for letting you walk out. The, uh, the blade through my chest was the fitting punishment,” he added quietly. His lungs turned to stone as Dean’s eyes flicked up, a tear breaking through his cheek. He pulled quickly up from where he sat and tressed both hands nervously through his hair, fluffed it, disrupted the crafted gelled spikes. Cas followed him, unfolding his leg quickly and stumbling off the couch. He stood next to him, waited a moment and when Dean didn’t turn, he reached a hesitant hand up and tugged his wrist down off his head.

Regret ran through Dean like neon lights.

“But, see?” Cas continued, his voice just above the hum of the forced air. “There was love in that moment too. The love was mine. It was obvious in that hollow ache I felt after you walked away.”

Dean squeezed his eyes shut, bit the shiver from his lip in vain. “Cas…”

“That’s why I say your love is the greatest kind, Dean. It’s even better than what the characters in the movie found. That love was tied to something--dancing. Yours isn’t. It’s raw and wild. You can’t control it. It just... _is._ And, maybe the curse stole it from you for awhile, but you got it back, and as soon as you did, you shared it again. I know because, you shared it with me earlier today. You share it with me now.” 

Dean suddenly grabbed the sides of Cas’ head, eyes desperate and fingertips digging into his hair. He pulled him closer, their chests bumping, his eyes flipping through Cas like the pages of a book.

Cas struggled a breath and stuttered a swallow as the heat on Dean rolled a nose full of wheaty hops and spicy aftershave. For a moment the room tumbled away and he was sucked into Dean’s eyes. The freckles splattered along his nose. The worry lines that were starting to make a permanent home as his youth whittled away. Cas’ eyes sunk down to his lips, and the thought of tasting them ached the back of his jaw in a way he’d never known before. His heart hit his ears, and he felt like his tie was a lot too tight. He was afraid the electricity between them might set the room on fire.

“That’s why I wanted to thank you,” he stumbled, licking nervously at his lips. The fleeting thought that torture was easier than this ripped through his mind, and he screamed at it to shut up. “Because, you taught me to love you with that same reckless abandon, and even if it hurts sometimes, it’s still worth so much more than never knowing it at all…” Dean nosed him, their lips brushing and Cas shivered. “Even at the cost of everything I used to have,” he whispered.

“Stop talking so I can kiss you, you idiot.”

Cas stuttered a breath. “Oh.”

Dean pushed into him, their lips meeting soft and easy. The cut along the bottom of Dean’s scratched against Cas as he worked his mouth open with just a peek of tongue. His chest billowed, his fingertips softened and ran in an arc behind Cas’ ears, chased the chills down his spine. 

The butterflies choked Cas’ throat, but the warmth from Dean mellowed them. Cas grabbed at the front of his shirt, handfuls of denim, buttons pushing marks into his flesh, and drew a sharp breath. 

He found his feet, tasted Dean, pushed into him, sunk into his body. His hands moved inside his button-up, around his sides, found purchase at the small of his back.

Dean hummed a smile beside Cas’ arrested expression, and they parted. Dean’s eye ran through Cas’ face again, thick and happy. “You can’t just say that shit to people,” he whispered with a stolen flush.

Cas chased him a moment, brushed their lips together again, felt the rough grain of his chin. He was floored by how different it was from when he’d kissed April. There’d been movement there… action… instinct… But, it hadn’t flipped his heart like a pancake. It hadn’t lit the edges of his brain on fire, or taken a hot poker to his brain stem like Dean’s did. 

His hands stumbled back out, clawing at the front of Dean’s shirt, pulling him forward. His pulse tore through his body. Every nerve was on edge, stripped and ready for Dean to touch him like that again. 

“Again,” he begged. 

He breathed in another wave of Dean’s smell, felt it prickle the back of his mind and coax the shudder from his body.

“You like that?”

Cas ran a hand down Dean’s face, nosed him. “That is an understatement.”

Dean smiled, his white teeth peeking from under his lip. “I can’t imagine that reaper did it for ya.”

“You do it for me.”

“Yeah?”

Dean brushed against Cas’ lips again. Looked carefully through him, his eyes half-lidded, breath heavy. He grabbed Cas’ tie, watched him carefully as he pulled it loose, tugged the tail from the loop, and slipped it from his shirt collar. 

Cas felt Dean’s solid hands, watched as his tie fell away. Adrenaline hit his ears, pushed tingles into his fingertips. “Are you undressing me, Dean?” His voice tripped out of him, tumbled from the edge of want. He couldn’t stop his hands from skimming Dean’s belt. Playing at the strap. Thinking about what was just beneath it.

“Would you like that?” Dean fingered the top button on Cas’ shirt, pulled it loose and rubbed a finger along the hollow tucked beneath. “Because, I don’t have to be.” 

He pulled another button loose, his hips swimming closer. His eyes were steady on Cas. Hungry through his face.

_Your turn, then my turn_ , Cas thought biting his lip again. “Are you dancing with me, Dean?”

A crooked smile kissed Dean's face, his eyes were bright in the soft blue light. “I’d like to,” he hummed.

Cas found his fingers, leveled his gaze, and pulled Dean’s belt from the loop. “Then what the hell are you waiting for?”


End file.
